One of dozens of combs lifted from the wild hive is removed from the floorboard and prepared for transport to Deierlings property where all the bees will move the honey from the buckets into the existing hives. Later, Deierling will melt the wax combs down to make candles.

Photo: Ian Williams

One of dozens of combs lifted from the wild hive is removed from...

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A large cell prepared especially for a new queen is empty. New queens are raised when the old queen is no longer productive. Photo by Ian Williams

I have always liked honeybees and even taught my children how to pet them. (It's no big trick: They are too busy collecting nectar to worry about a gentle touch to their back.) When I noticed many bees congregating under my backyard workshop, I thought this was fine. They would pollinate my vegetables and fruit trees. But the landing approach from neighborhood flowers to the hive soon consumed half my backyard, and the bees didn't like anything getting in their way, especially people. The time had come to move them.

The last thing I wanted to do was to kill the bees, which are mysteriously dying across the country at an alarming rate.

Since late last year, U.S. beekeepers have seen 25 percent of their colonies die off, about five times normal winter losses. In what's called colony collapse disorder, the bees simply abandon the hive, leaving behind their young brood, honey, pollen and usually the queen. The bees don't die in the nest, they just disappear, and the hive dies.

In seeking a happy new home for my wild bunch, I explained the situation on Craigslist and got a few responses, but only one person followed through.

Kevin Deierling, an amateur beekeeper who looks like a lanky "aw-shucks" cowboy, but is, in fact, a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, dropped by to size up the situation.

Standing just a few feet from the entrance under the workshop, we had scores of bees swarming around our legs. They seemed generally amiable, but children who regularly played back there and some friends were allergic to bee venom. The only way to get at the bees was to remove the shop floor.

That would be a big chore, but Deierling helped convince me: "I'll bet you have 10 to 20 pounds of honey under there." Visions of an endless supply of honey for biscuits danced in my mind.

The next day, I cut part of the subfloor into sections 2 feet wide by 4 feet long. I did not remove them, but pried up one corner out of curiosity. A wax comb filled with honey was visible, as were three bees giving me a hard stare. I pushed everything back into place.

Deierling arrived with a bee box containing ten 10-inch wood racks. The idea was to transfer the wax combs from this wild colony to the box, including the queen, and take them back to his property, where he had three hives. Not having dealt with wild bees before, he had wildly underestimated the haul.

After we suited up in protective gloves, hats and veils, Deierling pumped smoke under the shed to calm the bees. It wasn't entirely successful. My son Ian, 14, took three hits while photographing the event.

From inside, I pried up the first subfloor section and carried it outside. Attached to the underside was a wax comb filled with honey, pollen and thousands of bees. Thousands more bees swarmed around us but were not overly aggressive.

As we removed more floorboard sections, each coated with thick honeycombs, Deierling was stunned. It would have taken 10 times as many frames as he had brought to hold the honeycombs. "I'll bet you have 100,000 bees here," he said. That would be twice the size of a large hive.

Overwhelmed by the amount of material, we scraped the mass of combs, honey and bees into 5-gallon plastic buckets, filling five of them. There was more than 100 pounds of honey and combs.

"I do everything I can to raise production, but you didn't have to do anything. The wild bees did it all themselves," Deierling said.

The problem is that wild bee honey is not readily recoverable. In commercial bee production, the honey is stored in frames at the top of the hive, while the pollen, pupa, and larvae are on lower levels. This makes it easy to lift out the upper combs to extract the honey. In the case of wild bees, everything appeared mixed together.

Deierling searched through the combs for the queen bee, without success. Considering that the combs were oozing honey and completely covered with bees, this was understandable.

Back on his acreage south of Half Moon Bay, he merged the bees with one of his weaker hives and said they seemed to be doing well. "The bees have now sucked in most of the honey from the buckets, and I'll melt the wax down later for candles," he said.

After Deierling left, I surveyed the wreckage. It was not pretty. A couple of thousand bees had swarmed on the outside of the workshop near their old entrance that was now sealed. Scores more buzzed the immediate area, distraught and confused over the raid. I felt sorry for them. They had never bothered us much; they were just following their instincts.

There seemed to be political echoes in my pre-emptive strike. In my mind, I heard that lieutenant's voice from long ago in Vietnam saying: "We had to destroy the town to save it."

I hoped these survivors would set up a new colony and live happily ever after. Somewhere else.

The way a hive functions

Fossil records indicate the Western honeybee, or Apis mellifera, originated in tropical Africa 35 million years ago, then spread to Europe and Asia. European settlers brought it to North America in the early 1600s.

There are only three types of bees in a hive: the queen, the drones and the workers.

Queen: When a queen ages, worker bees prepare several large queen cells. The larvae in these cells are fed only royal jelly, a particularly nutritious substance that comes from the glands on the heads of nurse bees. In 16 days, the new queen emerges. The first one to appear immediately seeks out and kills other queens. A hive can only have one queen. When 10 days old, the virgin queen takes flight and is pursued by drones from nearby hives. They mate six or seven times with her in midflight and immediately die. The queen stores the semen and uses it to fertilize eggs, which she lays at a rate of about 1,200 per day for her two-year life.

Drones: These are males and are the result of an unfertilized egg. They have large eyes and cannot sting. They usually only number a few hundred in a hive, and their sole job is to mate with a queen. Otherwise, they hang around the nest and are fed by the worker bees until autumn. When food becomes scarce, they are pushed out of the hive.

Workers: These bees are the result of fertilized eggs and are female. The eggs are laid in perfect hexagonal cells and in three days the larvae hatch. They are fed royal jelly at first and then pollen for six days. At this point they become inactive pupae, sealed in their cells for 14 days. On the 20th day they emerge. Worker bees do everything in the hive except lay eggs and mate. They build the combs with wax produced under their abdomen, repair the hive, collect the nectar and pollen, store all of it, raise all the new bees, tend the queen and defend the hive.

On their rounds, bees suck up nectar from flowers and collect pollen on their legs. Back at the hive, the pollen is removed by fellow workers and stored for food. The nectar, which is 30 to 80 percent water, is stored, and when most of the water evaporates, the nectar becomes honey.

Worker bees live as long as 140 days in winter when they are semidormant. In summer they work themselves to death, lasting only 20 to 40 days.

A hive must be at 94 degrees to incubate the eggs. If it is too hot, the bees collect water and fan it through the hive to bring down the temperature. If it is too cold, they cluster around the brood area to raise the temperature.

-- T.J.W.

Domesticated colonies die, and food production suffers

"If honeybees become extinct, human society will follow in four years" is a prediction that's been attributed to Albert Einstein. Now that bees are dying at an unprecedented rate from an unknown cause, scientists are paying serious attention.

Since November, domesticated bee colonies in much of the United States have been dying at an unprecedented rate. It's estimated that about 25 percent of the colonies have died off, about five times the normal rate of winter decline. The National Academy of Sciences said honeybee colonies in the United States have shrunk by more than half in 50 years, from 5.9 million in 1947 to fewer than 2.4 million today.

The loss of bees is a serious threat to food production. The commercial value of bees as pollinators is estimated to be $15 billion a year.

Key crops like corn and wheat are wind-pollinated, but domesticated honeybees pollinate virtually all fruit, nut and vegetable crops. About one-third of everything we eat requires pollination by bees. Where does milk really come from? Well, the bees pollinate the alfalfa, which is fed to cows, which produce the milk.

California almond growers, who provide 80 percent of the world's supply, import millions of bees to keep their crops going.

The death of a hive is called colony collapse disorder, or CCD. The growing crisis has so far hit more than 30 states, and similar attacks are occurring in Canada and Europe. Oddly, the bees do not die in the hive; they abandon it, leaving behind the eggs, larvae, honey, pollen and often the queen.

The cause of CCD is unknown, but there are many theories and studies are intensifying. Chief suspects include a virus, bacteria, pesticides, fungus, parasites, a combination of these or something still unknown.

Is it the end of the world if the domesticated honeybee continues to die off? Not necessarily. The solution may lie in expanding the role of wild bees. In recent years, wild bees have suffered horrendous losses, down 90 percent by some estimates. The chief cause is considered to be lack of natural food sources such as local flowers and weeds.

But in certain test areas in California where natural plants for wild bees have been allowed to flourish, they have been highly successful pollinators. These include bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees and sweat bees.

Claire Kremen, a UC Berkeley expert on biodiversity, is studying how farming practices, which often remove all natural local vegetation to make room for crops, may have resulted in the die-off of native wild bees. She notes on her Web site that "a diverse community of native bee pollinators can provide sufficient pollination services for crops without the addition of managed colonies of honeybees, but that this service critically depends on the availability of natural habitat in proximity to the farm."